Things Fall Apart, Assignment 2 (12.30.12) Asserting Culture in the "Darkness"

I told you it would be up before the 30th!

In an interview in the 1994-95 issue of The Paris Review, Chinua Achebe states that he became a writer in order to tell his story and the story of his people from his own viewpoint. He explains the danger of not having one's own stories through the following proverb: "until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter." Critics and Achebe's own essays have portrayed Things Fall Apart as a response to the ideologies and discursive strategies of colonial texts such as Joyce Cary's Mister Johnson and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

 While reading Things Fall Apart, ask yourself in what ways Chinua Achebe's novel subverts (undermines, challenges, threatens, weakens, destabilizes, and/or sabotages) this discourse (mentioned above) and constitutes a different story or counter-narrative to the European texts and what narrative and linguistic strategies in the text help create a new perspective and new story of Nigerian and African history.

As an example of the ways in which Achebe has taken up European literary works and reframed the issues they raise, please examine William Butler Yeats' poem, "The Second Coming," (linked below and in the back of your book).  The title of Achebe's novel is a literary allusion to Yeats' poem.

While reading Yeats’ poem, you should consider and answer each of the following:

• What is the meaning of the phrase "Things Fall Apart" within Yeats' poem?
• What does the Second Coming refer to in general?
• What does the Second Coming refer to in Yeats' poem?
• As you read Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, note how the novel both takes up and changes Yeats' version of the Second Coming.  Who or what in the novel represents a "rough beast" that "slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"

As always, your answers should be thorough and in paragraph form.

A Little Guidance For The Attentive
One important theme in Things Fall Apart is the irreconcilable difference between Christianity's focus on individual salvation and the tribal vision of the group's salvation being dependent on the actions of individuals that Achebe portrays within his novel.  You should notice this cultural and religious difference as you read the "The Second Coming," along with its allusion to the Bible and Christian thought, in relation to the way Achebe applies the poem's line "things fall apart" within the novel.  In your subsequent analysis of the text, you should consider the grave implications of these incompatible views for Igbo society as Umuofia's citizens confront the British missionaries and their accompanying colonial government.

In “The Second Coming,” by William Butler Yeats the speaker describes a nightmarish scene: the falcon, turning in a widening “gyre” (spiral), cannot hear the falconer; “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold”; anarchy is loosed upon the world; “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned.” The best people, the speaker says, lack all conviction, but the worst “are full of passionate intensity.”

Surely, the speaker asserts, the world is near a revelation; “Surely the Second Coming is at hand.” No sooner does he think of “the Second Coming,” then he is troubled by “a vast image of the Spiritus Mundi, or the collective spirit of mankind: somewhere in the desert, a giant sphinx (“A shape with lion body and the head of a man, / A gaze as blank and pitiless as the sun”) is moving, while the shadows of desert birds reel about it. The darkness drops again over the speaker’s sight, but he knows that the sphinx’s twenty centuries of “stony sleep” have been made a nightmare by the motions of “a rocking cradle.” And what “rough beast,” he wonders, “its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

Form

“The Second Coming” is written in a very rough iambic pentameter, but the meter is so loose, and the exceptions so frequent, that it actually seems closer to free verse with frequent heavy stresses. The rhymes are likewise haphazard; apart from the two couplets with which the poem opens, there are only coincidental rhymes in the poem, such as “man” and “sun.”

Commentary

Because of its stunning, violent imagery and terrifying ritualistic language, “The Second Coming” is one of Yeats’s most famous and most anthologized poems; it is also one of the most thematically obscure and difficult to understand. (It is safe to say that very few people who love this poem could paraphrase its meaning to satisfaction.) Structurally, the poem is quite simple—the first stanza describes the conditions present in the world (things falling apart, anarchy, etc.), and the second surmises from those conditions that a monstrous Second Coming is about to take place, not of the Jesus we first knew, but of a new messiah, a “rough beast,” the slouching sphinx rousing itself in the desert and lumbering toward Bethlehem. This brief exposition, though intriguingly blasphemous, is not terribly complicated; but the question of what it should signify to a reader is another story entirely.

Yeats spent years crafting an elaborate, mystical theory of the universe that he described in his book A Vision. This theory issued in part from Yeats’s lifelong fascination with the occult and mystical, and in part from the sense of responsibility Yeats felt to order his experience within a structured belief system. The system is extremely complicated and not of any lasting importance—except for the effect that it had on his poetry, which is of extraordinary lasting importance. The theory of history Yeats articulated in A Vision centers on a diagram made of two conical spirals, one inside the other, so that the widest part of one of the spirals rings around the narrowest part of the other spiral, and vice versa. Yeats believed that this image (he called the spirals “gyres”) captured the contrary motions inherent within the historical process, and he divided each gyre into specific regions that represented particular kinds of historical periods (and could also represent the psychological phases of an individual’s development).

“The Second Coming” was intended by Yeats to describe the current historical moment (the poem appeared in 1921) in terms of these gyres. Yeats believed that the world was on the threshold of an apocalyptic revelation, as history reached the end of the outer gyre (to speak roughly) and began moving along the inner gyre. In his definitive edition of Yeats’s poems, Richard J. Finneran quotes Yeats’s own notes:

The end of an age, which always receives the revelation of the character of the next age, is represented by the coming of one gyre to its place of greatest expansion and of the other to its place of greatest contraction... The revelation [that] approaches will... take its character from the contrary movement of the interior gyre...

In other words, the world’s trajectory along the gyre of science, democracy, and heterogeneity is now coming apart, like the frantically widening flight-path of the falcon that has lost contact with the falconer; the next age will take its character not from the gyre of science, democracy, and speed, but from the contrary inner gyre—which, presumably, opposes mysticism, primal power, and slowness to the science and democracy of the outer gyre. The “rough beast” slouching toward Bethlehem is the symbol of this new age; the speaker’s vision of the rising sphinx is his vision of the character of the new world.

This seems quite silly as philosophy or prophecy (particularly in light of the fact that it has not come true as yet). But as poetry, and understood more broadly than as a simple reiteration of the mystic theory of A Vision, “The Second Coming” is a magnificent statement about the contrary forces at work in history, and about the conflict between the modern world and the ancient world. The poem may not have the thematic relevance of Yeats’s best work, and may not be a poem with which many people can personally identify; but the aesthetic experience of its passionate language is powerful enough to ensure its value and its importance in Yeats’s work as a whole.

“THE SECOND COMING”

              Turning and turning in the widening gyre (1)
              The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
              Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
              Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
              The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
              The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
              The best lack all conviction, while the worst
              Are full of passionate intensity.

              Surely some revelation is at hand;
              Surely the Second Coming (2) is at hand.
              The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
              When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi (3)
              Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
              A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
              A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
              Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
              Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
              The darkness drops again but now I know
              That twenty centuries (4) of stony sleep
              Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
              And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
              Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born

(1) Spiral, making the figure of a cone.

(2) Second Coming refers to the promised return of Christ on Doomsday, the end of the world; but in Revelation 13 Doomsday is also marked by the appearance of a monstrous beast.

(3) Spirit of the World.

(4) 2,000 years; the creature has been held back since the birth of Christ. Yeats imagines that the great heritage of Western European civilization is collapsing, and that the world will be swept by a tide of savagery from the "uncivilized" portions of the globe. As you read this novel, try to understand how Achebe's work is in part an answer to this poem.